Has anyone here quit caffeine after consuming it regularly for years? What was your experience, and was it worth it?
I’m considering doing this because I feel it is affecting my mood, energy, anxiety, and overall stability.
Not needing validation or anything, just curious to chat about it if anyone else has been through decaffeination
I have, yeah.
If you don’t want it affecting you too nuch then start slow. Half the caffeine dose daily for a few days, and stop drinking it on days you don’t need it (days where you get to sleep in). Then only have it every other day or so. You’ll lose your dependence soon enough.
My problem is I love coffee. The process of making it, sitting down and drinking it at home or at a cafe, and everything that goes with it like the dish ware.
I don’t think I could quit cold turkey like you mention. However I wonder if it’s better to switch to tea instead during the reduction period. It might be too easy to drink a second cup if the first cup goes down too quickly…
I have the same problem. I force myself to only have one cup of coffee a day because of it. I only drink a second if I really need to.
You could swap in some decaf to sub out 1 or 2 of your normal cups a day. If you drink a lot of it, definitely do not go cold turkey. I did that once and started getting horrible headaches. I’ve cut way back a couple times, switching to green tea but I don’t think I’ve ever been able to cut it out completely, sigh. Went for a good 6 months onky having a few green teas but like the other commenters, as soon as I got really busy and stressed, coffee was back on the menu.
How much coffee are you drinking? You can try reducing the portions so that your routine remains then later reducing the frequency. You could also sub some of the regular with decaf in increasing ratios like 75/25 then 50/50 then 25/75
2-3 cups a day.
Your idea of swapping in fractions of decaf is good. I haven’t had much luck in the past with decaf, which to me has an inferior taste. Also makes latte art difficult. Could never get a decent crema out of the decaf beans I tried. However, I’m not opposed to trying more decaf varieties.
I guess it depends on the decaffeination method but it might be worth some experimentation to find the right variety.
with any habit change, the less you have to think about it the easier it will be to make the change and to maintain it. Some hard limits can be good and have worked for me like no coffee after 12pm or limit the portion size to 1 espresso or 1 doppio but no more for each serving or only 2 servings per day, etc. I do think that at some level we are fundamentally lazy in the sense that it is easier to do nothing than it is to do something and it is easier to do something small than it is to do something big. That’s where smaller portions and adding steps to preparation (like storing the coffee less conveniently or do not grind more than you want at any moment even if you know you’ll immediately want more) can add friction to the coffee consumption process but also smaller changes are easier to adapt to and carryforward.
I’ve gone on and off caffeine quite a few times throughout the years. I felt physically better off caffeine, but found it hard to be functional enough without it.
How long were your “off” periods?
I’ve gone as long as an entire year without caffeine. I have seizures, so I quit caffeine when it causes me to have a seizure, usually end up back on it to be functional.
Headaches for 3 days followed by not being productive for a whole month. I was a grad student at the time so that was an option. I probably would have somehow gotten my ass into gear if I was at risk of losing my paycheck. But the plan is to keep consuming caffeine for the rest of my life.
Yeah, a bunch of times. I did five years in the coffee shop mines where excess consumption was encouraged. Switching to halfcaf or decaf when ordering coffee and switching to black tea as my morning drink helped a lot. I cut back because I was getting stomach indigestion, anxiety, loss of appetite, that kind of stuff. And upon reflection, I was actually more tired the more I drank caffeine; I was basically slug energy anytime I wasn’t actively consuming caffeine. Cutting it out has helped my energy levels a lot. I’m overall better off cutting it out and encourage you to give it a try.
I was regularly getting 800mg a day for about ten years, but recently cut to 400mg because of anxiety problems.
It went fine? I’m not taking less though lol
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Wow 800mg! How did you cut back? Fewer drinks, or did you eliminate a specific thing like coffee or Red Bull?
Energy drinks and coffee would be waaaay too expensive for my habit! I was taking super cheap caffeine pills. 200mg every four hours, four times a day.
I now take even cheaper 100mg pills every four hours, four times a day. Caffeinated drinks are a very rare treat, the pills are my medicine 👩⚕️
Quitting cold turkey is really rough. I take a week off several times a year to reset my tolerance. I usually have 2 to 5 days of bad headaches and severe lethargy. It really makes a huge difference on my mood and sleep schedule for the next couple of months, but its not easy
I have quit caffeine a couple of times. I’m such a fiend for it but it definitely increases my anxiety and makes my sleep less regular too. I taper off because I drink astronomical amounts. I usually halve my intake week over week until im down to just a cup of tea or something light, at which point I start taking odd days off of caffeine and then none at all. Normally my caffeine free streaks last a couple of months, until some late night project or early morning meeting ruins my energy levels and I start the cycle all over again.
I’ve been dependent on it for a decade plus and I heard it takes 6 months or more to get over the withdrawals so I’m just never gonna quit. i spend enough energy not being reliant on much more harmful substances that i have problems with. coffee is fine in comparison. i don’t take nearly as much as I used to though, like a couple espressos a day
Here’s my experience (recently diagnosed ADHD, suspect maybe AuDHD):
Starting about 6 years ago, I started having fairly large amounts of caffeine (300-400mg/day), probably as a way of self medicating ADHD and compensating for too little sleep). At this point, I realized I was physically addicted to caffeine, and if any day went by where I didn’t have caffeine by say 3pm, I’d get a bad headache. For the next ~3 years after starting this, I didn’t go a single day without coffee.
Starting about 2-3 years ago, I decided that I really didn’t like the idea of having to have a coffee every day, so I decided to try to stop my addiction. I stopped abruptly and didn’t have any caffeine for a month (for me, I knew a gradual stopping wouldn’t work, I had to fully commit to it to get it to stick). It was miserable, especially for the first 3-4 days. The first week as a whole was pretty rough, then week 2 was marginally better, week 3 a bit better still, and week 4 felt good, finally.
Since then, because I really like the taste of coffee, I’ve been consuming 2-3 coffees per week, but I try to avoid having them on consecutive days. I think it works pretty well for me, and I have managed to hold off the physical addiction like that (except for one time where I compensated for jetlag with lots of coffee, and got re-addicted and had to do the same miserable process as above).
Also, I recently started stimulant meds for my ADHD (Vyvanse in particular), and for a while I couldn’t have caffeine because it made me too anxious. Now, I’m used to the meds and can have caffeine, but it’s much easier to resist the temptation.
All in all, I’m happy that I’m not addicted anymore, and for me it was a painful process but worth it. I find that caffeine messes with my sleep even many hours after consumption, and I don’t feel as rested on days when I have it. I’ve mostly switched to drinking tea or decaf coffee, and I think it’s made me feel less anxious too.
Let me know if you have any questions!
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I have no intention of quitting, but I do limit myself to a single normal-sized cup of coffee with breakfast. I feel that’s a good balance. Always black, because I make damn good coffee, and truly good coffee can be enjoyed black. Good beans roasted within the past 1-2 weeks, ground with a Baratza Encore, and brewed with a Chemex setup. Quality over quantity.
I have a few times. Only for a few months at most though. The process of quitting sucks. Even after tapering my consumption of the course of a few weeks, when the time to stop came I felt like a helpless wet noodle of a human being for about two weeks until things kind of normalized. It did make the workday exceptionally tough to get through at first, especially since I was in a customer facing role at the time.
On the upside, it actually made mornings far better in terms of my energy level surprisingly enough. A lot of the grogginess of waiting until you’ve had a cup of coffee before you can function in the morning disappears and you can just wake up and start your day. Losing the ritual of drinking a cup of coffee was bittersweet though and I had to find other ways to start my day off on my terms.
I’ve gone through multiple periods in the past few years where I would cut out caffeine.
If you are able to consistently limit yourself to a rough amount my current answer is no, it’s not really worth it. A month or so ago I accidentally missed a cup of coffee in the morning so I decided to just cold turkey it. After the withdrawal symptoms went away there were a few days where I felt a lot more energetic than usual but that went away and I returned to my norm where I pretty much have to take a nap or two to comfortably function. After restarting caffeine it’s pretty much the same thing except I felt more energetic due to taking caffeine with a reset tolerance. Once it starts building up again, I return to the same thing where I need to take a nap.
I’ve had energy issues my entire life and I limit myself to ~100mg I think in the morning and at noon. I’m also shorter than average and I think my weight just above underweight so I might not need as much.
I’ve only ever gotten slight anxiety from caffeinated milkshakes sometimes.
I switched to tea, first strong black tea and slowly reduced the strongness untill I switched to green tea and now I don’t consume any caffeine. I never planned to stop drinking tea but unfortunately even the caffeine in green tea made me feel anxious.
The biggest step for me was quitting tea. For a few weeks I got headaches and felt fatigue in the morning that lasted a few hours. However the anxiety I get when drinking caffeine is worse. I still drink tea or coffee very sporadically and it doesn’t give as much anxiety as when I was dependent on caffeine. The habit of having a cup of coffee/tea in the morning is something I’d always loved and quitting that was the most difficult. Now I drink heated water in the morning and sometimes I add a little bit of salt. This depends on where you live but my tap water is tasty when heated.
Could you try herbal tea instead of plain water?
Sometimes I drink herbal tea but I still have to be careful with the kind of herbs as a lot of them also affect me negatively
